Discovering your self - Rousseau

The original nature of the human is to be peaceful, compassionate, cooperative and sympathetic towards others, according to Rousseau. This corresponds to life in peace and quiet prior to civilisation. It is only when people formed into societies that their characters developed negative characteristics such as aggression, selfishness and competition.

Having or being

Humans entered social relations as a result of of their own resourcefulness. Through clever thinking, the production of the necessities of life is facilitated. The creation of plenty required action to be taken to protect and retain the benefits of one’s crafty labour. This was the origin of property (Safranski p 156).

Increasingly, human productive intelligence becomes oriented to having rather than being and humans take on the character types required for property. The being-oriented self is not entirely lost but overwhelmed by the having-oriented one. People develop multiple selves, becoming ‘proteus-natured’, fragmented selves coexisting in the one person. Amongst this polyphony of civilised survival selves - greedy, lustful, miserly, mistrustful, dominating, mean, ruthless - the original self can occasionally still be experienced.

For Rousseau, in order to find the self of being rather than those of having it is necessary first to find peace and quiet. When this is achieved the conditions of pre-social humanity are present.

Then the work of getting in touch with the authentic self begins.

There are three stages at which the self can be rediscovered. The first is in a quiet setting away from interruptions by others, just self and nature. The second is a step beyond the first where the self merges with nature, bringing a feeling of oneness. The third is when the self ceases to be experienced at all. There is just being. (Safranski p160)

Rousseau might have agreed with Ernst Jandl’s view of art as a way to free oneself from the human conflict and anxiety distracting us from being: (the right type of) art becomes a way of finding being by leading our minds away from the affairs of other humans just as nature does for Rousseau.

He subsequently found that searching for the original self is a dangerous endeavour bringing selves necessarily into conflict. He proposed that all should be subordinated to a public will which everyone should swear allegiance to above their own self, enforceable if necessary by exile or death (guillotine). He became the philosopher of terror (French revolution).

Tweet This